Star Trek: What Did Picard Do After He Left the Enterprise? His New Autobiography Tells All

David A. Goodman is, among other things, a Star Trek TV writer and a lifelong fan. He's also written for shows like The Golden Girls, Futurama (he wrote the great Star Trek episode “Where No Fan Has Gone Before”), and Family Guy, where he was also the head writer for years. But now he has a new book out, The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard, which serves as a follow-up to his James T. Kirk "autobiography" from a couple of years ago.

I jumped on the phone to speak to Goodman about the Picard book, and along the way we discussed the parts of Picard's life not depicted in the show and movies, the captain's greatest achievements and biggest regrets, and even the merits of the latest descendants of Trek on TV -- The Orville versus Star Trek: Discovery.

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IGN: You’ve written for Star Trek: Enterprise in the past and now you’re working on The Orville as an executive producer and writer. Have you been watching Star Trek: Discovery?

David Goodman: Yes, I think it’s great. They clearly have a reverence for the canon and Star Trek has gone through a lot of iterations and I appreciate what these writers are doing. I think this is interesting; these are really smart, talented writers and a great cast doing something really interesting. I’m enjoying it.

IGN: Some fans who are not thrilled with Discovery so far have been saying things on the internet like "The Orville is the closest thing to Star Trek on TV right now, not Discovery."

DG: The older Star Treks, The Original Series and Next Generation, were obviously enormously popular with Star Trek fans but they were also television for general audiences. You could turn on those shows with no knowledge of Star Trek and jump in and understand what was going on and enjoy it. And that’s what The Orville has in common with those shows. Fans are actually picking up on something but it’s not the idea that it’s just like Star Trek. It’s that it’s a show in this vein on a spaceship, which has some similarities, but that is also meant for a general audience.

Star Trek: Discovery - 13 Things We Learned on the Set

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Here are 13 things we learned on the set of Star Trek: Discovery.

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Here are 13 things we learned on the set of Star Trek: Discovery.

Star Trek: Discovery - 13 Things We Learned on the Set

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IGN: You’ve written three Star Trek historical fiction books: Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years, The Autobiography of James T. Kirk and now The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard. What’s your approach to creating these stories?

DG: In the Kirk book it was about his father and being a father. And in the Picard book it was his relationship with his father and brother and then his longing for Beverly Crusher, which was only mentioned in a seventh season episode, that he was in love with her. But if you take that as canon -- and obviously I did -- that meant for as long as he’s known Beverly, he’s been in love with her. A third piece was, how was I going to make the Stargazer interesting because that was 20 years of his career that he was captain of that ship. The few bits of information we had about the Stargazer from Next Generation was that it was, when Picard was captain of it, that it was always on the verge of falling apart, that it was kind of a rust bucket, but he loved it.

I didn’t want to repeat the Kirk book where he became captain in the middle of a battle, even though there was some implication in [the Next Gen episode] "Tapestry" that he took command of the Stargazer bridge. It didn’t make sense that Picard was first officer because Q is saying that when Picard took command of the Stargazer bridge, that that was a special moment. If he was first officer there wouldn’t have been anything special about that. So I had to create a situation that pushed him to do that. Tapestry ended up giving me two very big set pieces in the book. Q says, when you saved the ambassador’s life on Milika III [and] when you took over the bridge of the Stargazer, he throws those two things out. So the Milika III incident really sends him on a different path from the path he was pursuing as a scientist. The other thing I came up with while I was writing the book that I was very proud of was I wanted to address why Picard doesn’t like kids and what is that about.

A young Picard literally looking up to his older brother Robert

IGN: Do we ever find out what happened to the Nausicaans who stabbed a young Starfleet officer named Picard in the chest and ran away?

DG: That’s in there! That’s a big part of the book. We see that incident through the lens of "Tapestry," where he says it’s this important moment in my life. But going back to that moment where he did that really stupid thing and got in a fight with these guys and got himself stabbed and the repercussions of what that did to his immediate career was really interesting to me too. Because you remember [he and his friend] rigged the dom-jot table. They were really kind of irresponsible there and it’s like, you want there to be, in the present, repercussions.

IGN: Do you cover this Frenchman’s obsession with British things like Shakespeare and Earl Grey tea?

DG: There was a note that covered something that I just loved but it didn’t get inside this edition of the book, unfortunately. Basically, I said that during World War III, France had been conquered by a guy named John Erickson who wanted to revive the British empire and that’s why in the 24th Century so many French people have British accents.

IGN: Did your research turn up anything you hadn’t remembered that surprised you?

DG: It’s more the timing of things. I try to be really diligent about placing things in the right time period based on where they were. So that moment where he meets Ben Sisko on Deep Space 9 has got to be right after he had been captured and tortured by the Cardassians. So here Picard -- having just been captured and tortured and rescued -- has to take the Enterprise near the Cardassian border to a Cardassian space station. I really wanted to deal with what was going on with him psychologically, what was he battling psychologically at that time. Everything gets sort of papered over but that was an incredibly traumatic experience for him and then his next order is, oh, go supply Deep Space 9, this old Cardassian station.

Picard and his crew from The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard

IGN: How do you decide which events make the cut?

DG: There are obviously things you’re not going to avoid: "Encounter at Farpoint," the Borg, "Best of Both Worlds," the death of Tasha Yar. But I’m also choosing things that help me tell the story that I want to tell. I spent some time thinking about why did Beverly leave the Enterprise. An emotional reason. I didn’t want just, “Oh, she got a better job offer.” I wanted to know the reason she wanted to leave and how does that affect him. The undercover mission with Picard and Data on Romulus [in the two-part episode "Unification"], rather than going through the details of an episode that everybody’s very familiar with, what I did was I established that one of the ways that Data and Picard met was they had been on another undercover mission years earlier.

IGN: What would you say is the single greatest achievement in Picard’s career in his opinion?

DG: That’s a very good question. I think that the roles that he played as a peacemaker and an explorer, those are the things I talk about and how important that was to him, especially [how] he plays a role in ending the first Cardassian war. He’s not necessarily credited for it, but he plays a role. He prevented the Federation from going to war needlessly.

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IGN: What about regrets?

DG: He has some regret about his father. Some regrets about his relationship with his father, which was a very interesting thing to explore. I came up with something that I’m just so happy with and I hope fans like about his father’s personal history. It doesn’t really come into play until midway through the book. He had regrets about his father and his brother, that he didn’t find a way to make a rapprochement with them before they died.

IGN: Can you give us some idea of what he does between the events of the last movie and the scenes that take place in the future timeline of Best of Both Worlds?

DG: He does become an ambassador to a well-known Federation planet. I get into what is the job of a Federation ambassador on a Federation planet, what’s that job? I have a little bit of fun with it but within a realistic concept of what an ambassador actually does. It’s sort of the tail end of his life.

The author, David Goodman, and his subject

IGN: You’re planning to do a similar book on Spock as well, right?

DG: Yeah, that’s my next book. Spock is in both the Picard book and Kirk book and there will be scenes in the Spock book that are also in the Kirk and Picard books but you’ll be seeing them from Spock’s point of view and the third book pulls the three together in a fun way, creating a real trilogy. There’ll be all sorts of prizes if you read all three in order.

IGN: We’re going to learn that Spock never liked Kirk?

DG: No! No, some of the interesting things about Spock you have to think about. What was it like for Spock on the Enterprise before Kirk got there?

IGN: Sure, Captain Pike.

DG: Yeah, what was that relationship like? Clearly it was very important for him, he risked his career for it. But the Picard book, I’m excited for fans to read it. I’m excited for fans to find problems with it honestly. I write these things for fans [like] myself, because I’m such a big fan with an eye toward making sure there are as few problems as possible but I’m always looking for someone to say, “You got that wrong!”